Fellow Travelers Read Free Page B

Manhattan. It was where the city’s immigrant population settled once they had made enough money to move into the middle or upper class and wanted to escape the newcomers like themselves who flooded into the city to replace them.
    The Grand Concourse was just what its name suggested—the Fifth Avenue of the city, the Champs Elysee , the Unter den Linden , a rich and stylish community. It was a handsome spacious thoroughfare, with a highway depressed in the middle. There were lines of trees planted down the center with boulevards on either side and big granite-faced townhouses rising behind them. There was a shopping district nearby, with stores at least as posh as Macy’s or Saks or any of the Fifth Avenue shops, and Pop lived off its rich and stylish customers. He was also the doctor most members of the immigrant Russian community preferred, never mind their politics. They were newcomers to the Bronx like himself and, increasingly, refugees from the revolution in Russia.
    Madame Onegin was one of those—I never knew her first name or why everyone always referred to her as Madame. She was a fulsome blonde who spoke English with a fractured accent, an attractive woman in a frowzy way, with fuzzy yellow curls and heavily made-up eyes, and I suppose you couldn’t blame Pop for wanting to help her out. The Onegins were white Russians tzarists, and somehow or other she and her husband had escaped with their fortunes intact. People like that always did, Pop used to say.
    It was ironic that a man whose heart bled over the tribulations of the poor spent most of his life serving the lives and wives of the frivolous rich. Raise the subject with Pop as I did a couple of times, and he would explain that it was these poor fools that made everything else possible: generated the money that enabled him to support the cause that would one day liberate all the downtrodden, those who huddled in the tenements on Rivington Street or the shanty towns of Pittsburgh, Homestead, or Canarsie, to say nothing of the hovels of Rome, London, Vienna, Berlin, and Athens, and for all I know Cairo and Bombay and Shanghai.
    Pop had never lived off the exploitation of anybody else. What he had he acquired by the sweat of his own brow—and arms and shoulders. I don’t know how many times we heard the story of how he had quit his job in the foundry, left his mother and father in Bridgeport, and went off to New York City to make his fortune. He got a job as a clerk in an apothecary shop on the Lower East Side, one of those places that in those days still had the great jars of colored water above the door, rows and rows of ornately-labeled bottles and boxes, drawers with brass handles and leeches swimming oilily in bottles atop the counter.
    Pop used the money he made as a drug clerk to pay his way through Columbia. He lived in a hall room in a cold-water flat on Hester Street, ate practically nothing, and never spent any money on anything that wasn’t absolutely essential. He studied by candlelight well into the night, learning the mysteries of the human body and soul. He already had discovered those of the human heart. It was one of those epic stories that haunt, inspire, intimidate, and disgust you all your life, on a par with Abe Lincoln learning law by the light of a log fire in that cabin or Handel destroying his eyesight writing music in Bonn by candlelight. You still hear stories like that, but when you do the heroes are Chinese—Asians I guess people call them these days, we called them Chinks—and they’re going to end up on top in a way just as Pop did
    My father was a remarkable man, and he played a powerful—I guess commanding—role in New York’s leftist politics in the years up until the end of the First World War. He represented the American Socialists in the meetings the international socialists held in Europe, and he held their attention in Geneva, Amsterdam, and Brussels as he did in New